Celebrating 20 Years

Online Trading Academy has its roots in the largest trading floor in the Western US, founded in 1997 by Eyal Shahar. Independent traders needed training to be successful in their investments, and soon a teaching model was born. By 2001 trading had transitioned to the web and we became 100% devoted to education. From a single location in Irvine, CA, today we’ve grown to 40 worldwide campuses and a worldwide online presence, and over 250,000 people have experienced OTA workshops and benefited from our mission: Enriching lives worldwide through exceptional financial education.

Indicators for Opportunities

Students of Online Trading Academy know that the core strategy we use for trading centers around trends and supply and demand. In fact, we do not use many technical indicators if any at all in our trading. Technical indicators are based on past price movement and volume and use a mathematical calculation to summarize the trend and momentum of price.

Traders who use technical indicators for buying and selling signals will quickly find that they are prone to false and late signals. Mike Siewruk from our Tampa, Florida office and I were discussing the potential use of these indicators for trading. While we agreed that these indicators are not good for signaling purposes, Mike stated that they can still be useful to screen out stocks that are more likely to offer trading opportunities.

Many traders struggle with finding the right stocks to trade. They may have some favorites that they regularly follow, but if those securities are not displaying the right setups, there is no point in trading them. So a trader could be wise to use a scanning tool to find stocks that are most likely to demonstrate great trading opportunities.

When we trade, it is wise to find stocks that are moving in a similar fashion to the broad market indexes. These stocks are more likely to move further and faster with the markets to provide greater profits.

While I would not use a stochastic indicator to signal an entry for a long, a stock that is showing an extreme oversold reading on the stochastics while in an up trend on a larger timeframe could be pulling back into an excellent demand zone.

You could use a combination of momentum indicators to identify the strength of the trend with oscillators to time the potential reversals. For those of you who are not familiar, the momentum indicators measure the strength and direction of the prevailing trend with a slight lag.

Oscillators on the other hand show when price is oversold or overbought compared to previous prices. There are usually lines on the oscillators like the 80 or 20 line on the stochastics to show this. The problem with the oscillators is that the price can stay overbought or oversold for a while in a strong trend. That is why you need to rely on supply and demand zones to tell you the reversal points. Oscillators will only offer signals once prices have bounced from those zones.

You can learn how to read these indicators and oscillators from many trading books. To learn how to trade the proper way with Online Trading Academy’s core strategy, visit your local training center and enroll in one of our courses.

Disclaimer

This newsletter is written for educational purposes only. By no means do any of its contents recommend, advocate or urge the buying, selling or holding of any financial instrument whatsoever. Trading and Investing involves high levels of risk. The author expresses personal opinions and will not assume any responsibility whatsoever for the actions of the reader. The author may or may not have positions in Financial Instruments discussed in this newsletter. Future results can be dramatically different from the opinions expressed herein. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
Reprints allowed for private reading only, for all else, please obtain permission.